Hello. Thank you for using Paid Memberships Pro. I'm not too familiar with BuddyPress, but you can have people sign up for the free level, and lock down certain aspects of BuddyPress. Is this what you were thinking about? You can look at this code gist as a starting point:

thanks for the information. i actually fikgured out that when buddypress registration is disabled, pmp and buddypress work pretty well together. not a complete integreation, but it works well enough for me for now. and yes, i've checked out that gist. i, however, want to keep buddypress aspect open to pmp members at this time. thanks for your help!